Cusco Apartment Hunting

The beautifully embroidered banner
of the dance group we saw.

Well, we may have found our apartment today. Again, who you know proves more advantageous than what you know.

My father has a friend named Bernard who lives in Paris, France. No problem though, because Bernard is married to a Peruvian woman named Susan. Susan's brother lives in Cusco and connected us with his friend Margerita who has a beautiful building with a number of really nice apartments that may work for us. She doesn't even advertise her rentals because she does just fine through word of mouth, and in doing so avoids a lot of riffraff since her friends have pre-screened the tenants for her.

Her buildings are in a neighborhood called San Blas, which is completely different from anything we have seen up to now. The streets climb steeply up from the center of town and are so narrow that you literally have to press your back against the walls when cars drive by. These streets were probably built 500 years before anyone thought about clearances for motorized vehicles.

The matchbox-sized taxis of Cusco are

just small enough to fit through many
of the streets.

We went to see another rental place later in the day that was positively vile which helped us make up our mind. On the way back to our current abode we were stopped in our tracks by the parade featured in the video below. We exited the cab and joined the revelry.

Chasing down the parade